124 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



of exploration by an incidental trade in fur. Just afterward, the 

 first Indians whom Marquette met on the Mississippi, were wear- 

 ing French cloth. Daring the winter of 1674-5, when that mission- 

 ary lay sick at Chicago, two traders were already encamped in the 

 vicinity. 



For more than a hundred years, the ISTorthwestern beaver trade 

 flowed on with a colossal and all-pervading stream. In 1791, the 

 skins collected there for Montreal merchants amounted to more 

 than ha'f a million (565,000). A few years after John Jacob 

 Astor, "sagacious of his quarry from afar," engaged in this traffic 

 ■with hundreds of boats, thousands of men and millions of capital. 



Green Bay was his point of departure, as Mackinaw had been 

 that of the French for many generations. But his employes 

 pushed through the continent to the western ocean. Most of his 

 fortune came from fur, and it would have been twice as large, but 

 for the war of 1812. But even Astor's fur agents of all classes 

 were largely descendants of French voyageurs who had taken up 

 their abode in the Northwest ages before. 



Falsehood and false fancies were also among the forces which 

 first hurried the French far west. 



It is through no longing for alliterative initials that I add false 

 fancies and falsehood as a fourth force to fun, falih and fur. At 

 that period all travelers, if not Munchausens themselves, believed 

 Munchausen stories, and when people are willing to be deceived, 

 they are deceived. Demand for lies never lacks supply. 



One Frenchman in Florida, when he saw a squaw so wrinkled 

 that there was no room for one furrow more, believed the report 

 that she had outlived five generations. Another, near Newfound- 

 land, landed on an isle of demons not without wings, horns and 

 tails. A third, when certain Canadian chiefs told him of a race 

 who had but one leg and lived without food, took them to France 

 for repeating their story to the king. These were sons of men 

 who had been creiulous to Yenetian merchants, who, selling spices 

 for their weight in gold, advertised them as no product of the 

 vulgar earth, but plucked from branches thrown down from the 

 battlements of BJen by compassionate cherubim. The age of 

 faith was not yet over. As recently as the last year of the seven- 



